MAHA Tracker

Movements make for strange bedfellows, all the more so since Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), a landmark Supreme Court decision that changed the calculus of campaign finance. In that 5 - 4 decision, the Court determined that restrictions on political spending by corporations and unions are inconsistent with the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Since then, corporations have had a field day in terms of influencing elections and legislation, but who is doing the influencing can be difficult to suss out. These relationships are often hard to discern because corporations and individuals create entities that obscure connections between the rich and powerful and the laws and regulations they seek to put in place.

An emerging example of this is the MAHA movement, Make America Healthy Again. Take the title; who wouldn’t support making America healthy? It sounds like a movement with earnest parents at the helm. But we know a few things. We know that RFK, Jr, in his misplaced role as Secretary of Health and Human Services, is its figurehead, with White House support. We also know this right wing playbook:

1. create political action committees that appear at first glance to be independent entities;

2. create organizations that appear to be independent entities;

3. find movements that can be repurposed to the cause;

4. develop messaging that appears hard to dispute on its face.

A new online tracker (MAHAtracker. com) has been created to track the MAHA movement’s funding, structure and relationships. It was developed by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR.org), which researches and monitors right wing movements and identifies strategies to counter their influence. The impetus for creating the tracker was the challenge in monitoring so many relationships and data points. Devin Burghart, IREHR’s director, notes, “IREHR has been monitoring the MAGA money trying to Trojan Horse anti-vaccine conspiracies in the guise of MAHA from the outset. We created the MAHA Tracker to put the data in one easy-to-access dashboard—financial info, leadership ties, legislative agenda, social media followers, and endorsements—to sound the alarm bell and defend public health.”

Using original source data, IREHR identifies key patterns and relation-ships. IREHR developed the tracker to follow the money, visualize the leader-ship network, see social media growth, and identify MAHA-backed candidates. Updated each day, the tracker enables individuals and organizations to monitor key indicators of change in real time.

It is a very valuable resource. With the relationships mapped out, I was then able to look up Federal Election Commission and Form 990 tax filings of some of the organizations and see how the contributions of separate organizations dovetailed to advance MAHA movement strategy.

For example, the MAHA Tracker maps relationships between anti-vax groups, including those that predate the MAHA movement, and the MAHA movement. Two organizations whose leadership overlaps with MAHA PAC are Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and the Autism Action Network (AAN). Children’s Health Defense, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2007, remained a small organization until RFK Jr. joined its board in 2014. To build a constituency in the Black community, CHD tied its anti-vax stance to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, one of the most egregious abuses of human rights in US history, in which Black men were infected with syphilis and left untreated. CHD produced a film in 2021 called Medical Racism: the New Apartheid, predicated on false information, which warned communities of color to distrust vaccines, asserting that “the same thing that happened in the 1930s during the eugenics movement” was occurring. The Autism Action Network, a 501(C)(4) nonprofit, provided targeted support to the International African American Arts Festival to disseminate the message.

Who are the organizations that contribute heavily to the MAHA movement? Among the companies the Tracker has identified, a large contributor ($500,000) to the MAHA Political Action Committee (MAHA PAC) is Botanic Tonics, LLC. The company is an online retailer of a “tonic” that promotes well-being. Its reputation is poor. Its products contain kratom, a highly addictive substance, whose potency often isn’t known by customers. A related lawsuit, filed in 2023, asserted that the primary “feel good” ingredient in the company’s “Feel Free Wellness Tonic” was kratom. Only days ago, a wrongful death lawsuit was filed related to kratom. Botanic Tonics recently sought a preliminary injunction to prevent

restrictions on its distribution.

The expenditures of the MAHA Alliance are also telling. For example, in October and November of 2024, the PAC contributed more than $780,000 to Donald Trump’s campaign. In the 2026 election cycle, the MAHA Tracker has calculated expenditures of $9.63 million for and against specific candidates.

The MAHA Tracker is a real asset in tracking these relationships. As long as Citizens United shapes campaign finance reporting, the tracker should serve as a model for how to unpack other movements with complex, often obscure, relationships and strong ties to right wing funders, strategists and legislators.